Or at least that parts of it that were not rosé-soaked? Well my data beats your whining rhetoric. If progress continues at the current rate, it will take 15 years before all children are school ready by the age of five and more than 40 years before the attainment gap between poor 5 years-olds and their better-off peers is closed (Source: Social Mobility Commission). Some businesses are finding that all of a sudden they can after all find the will to cut through the sluggishness and conservatism of their own organisational process and catapult themselves into the future. We’re feeling that loss of safety.

For their part if they want to leverage the creative problem solving skills at their disposal, then client organizations are going to have to start giving their agency partners real problems to solve and jettison the bureaucratic psychobabble logjam known as the client brief. The Institute for Supply Management, which conducts monthly economic surveys, found that nearly 75 percent of the companies it contacted in late February and early March reported some kind of supply-chain disruption due to the coronavirus. %%Invocation: path/gs -P- -dSAFER -dCompatibilityLevel=1.4 -q -P- -dNOPAUSE -dBATCH -sDEVICE=pdfwrite -sstdout=? These technologies are used for things like: We do this with social media, marketing, and analytics partners (who may have their own information they’ve collected). And while 71% of business leaders cite future cashflow as a business priority - only 49% of business leaders believe that a strong brand impacts future cashflow. Ready to hang. The outcome we want seems likely, but nothing is guaranteed, and much of it depends on what we do in these next few weeks. Or seventy-foot waves coming at you. And that the worst is also sometimes what happens. They may unfold long after your death. Antidepressant use in the US increased from 7.7% in 1999–2002 to 12.7% in 2011–2014 (Source: Centers for Disease Control). For paradise does not require of us courage, selflessness, creativity, passion: paradise in all accounts is passive, is sedative, and if you read carefully, soulless.”, “To me, the grounds for hope are simply that we don’t know what will happen next, and that the unlikely and the unimaginable transpire quite regularly. We should feel proud and confident in that role. Because things got really simple, really fast. So we should be asking what can we accelerate? So let’s be in no doubt. Etsy keeps your payment information secure. “Black swan” is a term for something rare but consequential that may look obvious in retrospect but comes as a surprise at the time it happens. That’s not a hopeful thought but it can drive the action that leads us toward our hopes. And this is the funny thing about people who don’t want to be bothered: they’ll assume that a given outcome is inevitable, as in requires nothing from them, and then when something else happens instead, they’ll assert that that too was inevitable, and had nothing to do with their doing nothing. But not all black swans are on your side. We’ve been paralyzed, living in the world without feeling it.”, Yet amidst the fragility and carnage, the suffering and the fear, the anxiety and dislocation and the endless vistas of existential angst… we can, we must, still hope. But there’s also a danger of people becoming so confident they’ll sit back and wait for it to happen. Yes, of course this fucked up shit that we living and dying through should scare the crap out of us. The need for agility and decisiveness will squeeze out the old tolerance for politics and turf wars. Much to reinvent.

The businesses and brands (and the STEM graduates that own/run them) shaping our lives and dominating the corporate landscape have little or no background or interest in the inherited wisdom and assumptions of marketing and brand building. Find out more in our Cookies & Similar Technologies Policy. A pandemic like this had long been predicted.

The number of hate crimes reported to police has more than doubled since 2013 (Source: Home Office). By 2015, the equivalent gap was 128 times more (Source: Social Mobility Commission). Air pollution was the cause of 7 million premature deaths in 2014 (Source: World Health Organization). Politics, economics, and demographics have transformational firepower we do not. Between April 2010 and April 2018, the median pre-tax weekly earnings of an employee in the UK fell by around 3% in real terms (Source: Office for National Statistics). Creativity hasn’t died. But all together, this is new. The Anthropocene, the Great Acceleration, the age of climate change whatever you want to call it, we’ve been out of synch with the biosphere, wasting our children’s hopes for a normal life,  burning our ecological capital as if it were disposable income, wrecking our one and only home in ways that soon will be beyond our descendants’ ability to repair. %%+ -dEmbedAllFonts=true -dSubsetFonts=true -dCompressFonts=true -dNOPAUSE -dQUIET -dBATCH ? And early. If I’m hopeful in this election, it’s because I see people all over this country working hard to write the next chapter of this country’s history. And much to cast onto the bonfire of our vanities.

Literally everybody is making it up as they go along. I say this because hope is an axe you break down doors with in an emergency; because hope should shove you out the door...  because it will take everything you have to steer the future away from endless war, from the annihilation of the earth's treasures and the grinding down of the poor and marginal… Hope just means another world might be possible, not promised, not guaranteed. Only half of 30 year olds in the US make as much as their parents did at the same age (Source: Bureau of Economic Research). Yet in the world of my old mentor Laurence Green, “we’ve allowed our business to have its tasks sliced and diced in the style of a sub-prime mortgage bundler. Others recognize it, grasp it, and make something of it, and long-term social and political transformations, both good and bad, arise from the wreckage. The door to this ear's potential paradises is in hell.”, “But hope is not about what we expect. But what we are observing (rather than merely hypothesizing) is an acceleration.

Individually or as smaller groups, people have felt this. Amidst the sea of incrementalists,  there will still be good, visionary clients who believe in the power of creativity and ideas to transform a business and give it a new, previously unimagined future. Or refuse to indulge in woke-washing, green-washing, or marketing stunts masquerading as corporate commitment. Maybe this time around we believe it because to some degree we’ve lived it. It will remain only an attempt if, again we don’t sit back and assume it’s inevitable; coup attempts often do fail, if people resist. To borrow the words of  the anti-globalization activist and writer Richard Grossman, we create “the images and metaphors of our time”. In the words of David Kessler, the world’s foremost expert on grief: We feel the world has changed, and it has… The loss of normalcy; the fear of economic toll; the loss of connection. The price, the speed of delivery, and the kindness of the seller made this purchase even more worthwhile. You know, a lot of extraordinary stuff is happening and it’s happening in very complex ways.

Etsy uses cookies and similar technologies to give you a better experience, enabling things like: Detailed information can be found in Etsy’s Cookies & Similar Technologies Policy and our Privacy Policy. The nuclear catastrophe at Chernobyl was waiting to happen, thanks to bad design and bad maintenance protocol. We tend to write out the things we’ve taught ourselves are unbelievable and impossible, and sometimes that exclusion is even written into the software: a few decades ago, the NASA computer measuring the hole in the ozone layer over Antarctica rejected the incoming data because it was so much more extreme than the parameters that had been established. We might, for example, wish to refuse to treat women as meat puppets existing only for male domination and satisfaction. If you’d like to file an allegation of infringement, you’ll need to follow the process described in our Copyright and Intellectual Property Policy. Recognizing this represents creativity’s best chance at (finally) liberating itself from the self-imposed limitations it has laboured under for too long. The rest of us are just dangling, precariously off the end of it. Whichever way you look at it, this is a collective failure of the first order. She is the loveliest of black swans. It is an axe you break down doors with in an emergency. There’s a happy medium, as anyone who’s convinced a child that there is not actually a monster under the bed knows, and also sometimes there are monsters under the bed.

Creativity hasn’t died.

Between 1995 and 2020, the proportion of people who are “dissatisfied with democracy” has risen by around +10% points, from 47.9 to 57.5% (Source: Center for the Future of Democracy, Global Satisfaction with Democracy, 2020). Of course “What the pandemic has exposed” is fast getting to be a tired journalistic trope. The role of advertising as a first strike cultural change agent is highly disputed. I can ship anywhere, I use USPS flat rate shipping. Perhaps then it should be no surprise that only 9% of Britons want life to return to "normal" after the coronavirus outbreak is over (Source: YouGov, April 2020). It's to bet on your futures, on your desires, on the possibility that an open heart and uncertainty is better than gloom and safety.

they keep coming back), reducing price elasticity (i.e. In order to give you the best experience, we use cookies and similar technologies for performance, analytics, personalization, advertising, and to help our site function. Even if some of us were clenched in horror as we saw him approach, a lot of other people were blindsided. Rebecca Solnit on Black Swans, Slim Chances, and the 2020 Presidential Election "The tricky thing about hope is to not confuse it with optimism." In the US, the rate of individuals reporting symptoms consistent with major depression over the past year increased 52 percent in teens and 63 percent in young adults over a decade (Source: American Psychological Association). And conversely, what should we cease accelerating, illuminating, normalising, and scaling? Part of what made me tense with horror all through the month before that election was how many people thought 91 percent was as good as 100 percent. It’s a mirror image of pessimism, which likewise assumes it knows the future, only pessimism’s future is dismal and not up to us either. Etsy shops never receive your credit card information. The final coup de grâce to round off marketing’s inexorable decline into short-termism and withdrawal from anything that looks like sustainable long-term value creation, aka real marketing. “Hope is not a lottery ticket you can sit on the sofa and clutch, feeling lucky. We understand human nature better than any consultancy. If you’ve already done that, your item hasn’t arrived, or it’s not as described, you can report that to Etsy by opening a case.